We had run out of gas for our cooker, which meant that we couldn’t do anything – no cooking of veggies, no re-heating of food, no hot drinks, no toasting of stale bread, no hot water for showering. We let Julio ‘the keeper of keys’ know, but 2 days later we still hadn’t gotten a new bottle of gas.
It was late on night and I just really wanted a hot drink. So I said (to no one in particular), “We could cook over a fire on the kitchen floor, if only we had wood”. My roomie heard me and said, ”Well we can chop up one of those wooden chairs…”
NO WAY. Some villager had spent ages bending the sapling branches to make that pretty chair, we cant burn it! Well OK.
Our kitchen is practically outside, just walls of bamboo with huge open spaces for windows and there is a 30cm gap between the top of the bamboo and where the roof starts – so there is good ventilation, and our floor is just concrete.
We stacked the wood, tore up a box and lit the fire! It went up beautifully! We had kept the legs and seat of the chair so we put a pot of water on the seat and it boiled really quickly.
YAY! I had my hot chocolate and now I could go sleep!
The next morning I lit the fire again and made a cuppa and heated some sausages over the coals – I even heated water for my shower!
Finally Cassandra saw Julio and led him into the kitchen to see our fire place – needless to say we got gas an hour later!
Cass had also recently received a parcel from the States containing marshmallows!!! So one night we re-lit the fire (the wood is nearly finished now) and using sticks we roasted marshmallows over the fire! Yum!
Now I’m saving the last few wooden sticks to have a ‘braai’ (barbeque) – I bought some ‘boerewors’ (SA sausage) in Nampula – I’m excited and looking forward to it!
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